First off – we are on snow day number three here at InsureMe, meaning the office is officially closed. A few of us are in the office this morning though…cabin fever was killing me and I won’t be in next week, so I wanted to get something accomplished before 2007.

Here is a picture looking out of the west side of the InsureMe building…pretty snowy, eh? Alright, enough about the darn snow, let’s talk about AdWords.

One of the biggest complaints that advertisers have about Google AdWords is the lack of clarity Google gives when it comes to their Quality Score calculation. Since Quality Score is one of the key elements to Google’s ad serving algorithm, not “getting” quality score can be a little more than frustrating for an advertiser.

It seems that Google may have finally realized that they were being a bit vague when explaining Quality Score, and in a rare act of “black box” clarification, Google has added a fair amount of information about quality score to the AdWords help center.

The new Quality and Performance sections are:

Quality and Performance Overview
Quality and Performance Factors
Troubleshooting
Improving Ad Performance

While I doubt there is any super-secret AdWords info in any of the pages, but getting a high level understanding of Google’s intentions certainly won’t hurt. So if Quality Score has been hurting your head as bad as it has hurt ours in the past, print out everything you can from these help sections, grab a cup of hot chocolate, and read away. Who knows…you could figure something out that could make you a gillion dollars. :)

[Bonus: I enjoyed this post on Quality Score over at the Out of My Gord blog.]

Posted by James Omdahl at 08:41 AM | Permalink | Comments (0)

Well, the snow continues (for now), and the InsureMe office is closed for the second day in a row. Actually, pretty much everything is closed today, including most of the shopping malls.

Our apologies to anyone trying to get a hold of us on the phone. It looks like the road crews are making some headway on the highways, so I am hoping that I will be able to brave the roads in the morning to get into the office.

We have about two feet of snow on the ground in downtown Denver and it sounds like they might have three feet at the office. On the plus side, it is guaranteed to be a white Christmas here in Denver.

Posted by James Omdahl at 12:46 PM | Permalink | Comments (2)

There’s a blizzard here in Denver today, so the InsureMe office is closed. Thankfully, our office was closed early on this morning so most of us got the word before we left our houses (thanks Tim!).

Sounds like the snow will keep coming until tomorrow afternoon – but I am hoping to be back in the office in the morning.

Here is a photo I took from my balcony at home. It doesn’t do much justice to the storm…but it sure is pretty. This is one of the reasons why we live in Colorado…snow rules. :)

Posted by James Omdahl at 02:06 PM | Permalink | Comments (3)

I have never been a big fan of Ask.com. I always felt that the company did a good job at marketing itself (who can forget Jeeves), but never really delivered when it came to search experience.

I remember back in the day, Ask’s search results were basically 50 PPC ads with 10 natural search results. Going to Ask at that point usually led to more frustration than anything.

A couple years back, Ask dumped Jeeves and decided to clean up their search results. Suddenly the piles of paid results were gone, and what was left looked like your average search engine. The only noteworthy feature was the little binoculars that gave screenshot previews of web pages. The problem was that even though you could use the cool binoculars, the results themselves were bound to be bad, since the search algorithm that Ask used was fairly ineffective.

Today though, I am happy to report that I am proud of the Ask team. Why? Their self titled “double-secret sandbox for testing Ask experiences of the future” or for short Ask X.

Ask X may very well be a preview of what your search experiences might look like in the future. From its triple pane layout to its integration of useful information like encyclopedia definitions, Ask X really does give a more satisfying search experience than Google or Yahoo.

Here is a screenshot for a Ask X search for the term "Denver":

As you can see, Ask X not only gives web search results, but it gives maps, images, current weather, current time, dictionary and encyclopedia entries for Denver. – pretty much attaching the majority of the information you might be searching for about a city. Also, the pane on the left helps you narrow, expand and find related topics…and presents those options in a way that I would actually use (not like Yahoo’s related search terms that are pretty easy to miss).

I could picture myself using an interface like Ask X to really research a topic, as well as using it to just get quick info as well (like checking weather and traffic).

So take a few and go look at Ask X. While I don’t think this is going to make Ask any more popular in the long run, I think some of the concepts seen on Ask X could (should) be incorporated into future iterations of the tow major engines (Google and Yahoo).

[Thanks to the Lisa Barone at the Bruce Clay blog for her post on the topic]

Posted by James Omdahl at 03:56 PM | Permalink | Comments (0)

As you know (hopefully!), keeping your Web site copy fresh, timely and relevant is really important. Since this is where your customers get information about your business, as well as the place where you connect with them, begin relationships and hopefully draw them in so they keep coming back, your copy is one of the best ways to communicate—as well as put money in your pocket.

Great copy is also important for your PPC campaigns. When your copy doesn’t measure up where consumers are concerned—or doesn’t deliver what you promised in your ads—consumers looking for information are likely to abandon your site, causing conversion rates to plummet. The result? A lot of time spent revising copy and trying to resuscitate dying ad groups. And no one enjoys that!

I recently ran across a great article on MarketingProfs.com titled, “Ten Key Questions for Your Web Copy.” It suggests some up-front tips for focused writing based on key questions we should be asking ourselves before we even get started. If writing content just isn't your thing, I think this article might really make your day!

So without further ado, I'd like to share some realizations I gleaned from the author for reviving copy now (as it relates to promoting insurance):

• Don't hit your visitors over the head with the "get a quote" idea. Instead, all articles (not just your homepage!) should make them feel welcome and demonstrate an understanding of their needs, desires and challenges.
• Content should be easily accessible and articles written in laymen's terms—don't assume they know the lingo!
• Contact information should be complete and easy to find—not buried!
• Articles should be relevant and contain meaningful content such as news, how-to's and helpful guidelines. This helps establish your expertise and gain consumer trust.
• Find out what copy works and what doesn't using script tracking and A/B testing—then "pump" what works and "dump" what doesn't. This is a great way to refine your online advertising campaigns.

For more info on reviving your Web copy, check out the article here. This is great (and easy) reading!

Posted by Penny Hagerman at 03:26 PM | Permalink | Comments (0)

I received a comment on the Are the Natural Search Results Bugging Out? Post from The Ninja Affiliate (which I’ll abbreviate TNA from now on) regarding some ideas that Mar and I were exchanging in the comments section of the post.

TNA made some interesting points about how all SEO is a form of spam, which I agree with, and some points about how Google hand manipulates the search results to favor large insurance companies, which I don’t. Here is TNA’s comment:

Every link that is purchased, asked for as a reciprocal and so on is spam. If you have to give something more than what your site can offer to get a link, that is spam. The search engine results that you don’t pay for are called natural search for a reason. Natural means it was earned with out you even asking or knowing about it. I hate to say it, but to some degree we are all spamers. White hat, as well. Any one in a competitive field that is successful is buying links; Google, Yahoo and MSN all know it. But what are they to do. There hands are tied. If they penalized on this 100% it would make all the big insurance companies disappear from the natural search result. I’m sure this is driving the engineers crazy. With that said it is true the big dogs get special treatment. This is where the comments by google saying they do not hand manipulate the result bug me. They don’t for all but for individuals they do. Lets say you got 300 links to a new domain and a well know insurance company did the same to a new domain they bought for them self’s trying to branch out. I guarantee your new domain will get healed out of the natural search a lot longer than the big insurance company. Computers/algorithm are just not smart enough to know the difference between the big company and little guy when they are new domains. There is no doubt that someone has their hands in it. If you check any competitive keywords in the natural search in the first page you will find bought or sponsored links (which is the same) on all the domains. Nothing will build a strong site better than name recognition.
The Ninja Affiliate

Good points Ninja…we all are forced to “spam” a bit, mainly because some “spamming” techniques like buying links and/or reciprocal links are the cost of admission into the upper levels of the search results. While this must certainly drive the Google engineers crazy, it also is a problem that they created – and as long as the first page of Google’s results continue to be prime real estate, people are going to try to get to the top. I guess I am just happy that Google doesn’t hand out positions based on market cap…which brings me to your next point.

I have mixed feelings on the hand manipulation issues you brought up. While it does seem like the big brand names get preferential treatment, I would argue that, at least in Google, they don’t. I have been watching the search results for the term “health insurance” for a number of years now. Three years back the first page was full of unknowns, not brand names. A glance at the big brands web sites showed why…they were very search engine unfriendly. In the last year or so many of the big health insurance companies have made improvements to the search engine friendliness of their sites (title tags, spiderable homepages, etc.).

In addition, these large insurance companies tend to have very well aged domains…since they usually purchased them early in the .com days. And as we all know, the older the domain, the more Google will let you get away with (i.e. rapid link building).

With on-page optimization and domain age issues under control, these sites tended to rank really well, even without a concentrating on building links. Why? Because big insurance companies draw quality links based on brand alone. These companies get quality .com, .edu and even .gov links as they are often cited as resources by news outlets, government agencies and student oriented websites. While getting these links has no real direct cost, I don’t really see these links as “free,” since large insurance companies spend millions building brand awareness that eventually leads to these links.

Overall, I would say that manipulation has very little to do with big brands dominating the Google results. I think the heavy reliance on quality links, which the big brands draw in as a byproduct of offline advertising) is more of the culprit.

Yahoo! is another story – their search reps. have admitted in the past to manipulation of results. I think this is a necessary evil for Yahoo! as their ability (or desire) to detect the quality of a link seems to be limited.

Thanks again for the bringing up an interesting and controversial topic Ninja…admittedly, I could be giving Google way too much credit here, but it’s just the theory I have come up with to feel better about how dang hard it is to rank well for terms like “health insurance” and “auto insurance.” :)

Posted by James Omdahl at 08:48 AM | Permalink | Comments (3)

This is our final video blog entry for our Insurance Blog - I thought I would share it over on the Affiliate Blog as well. Don't worry, we will start posting videos on our Agent Blog after the new year starts.

We decided to do a fairly ridiculous Holiday Special. Enjoy...

Posted by James Omdahl at 04:12 PM | Permalink | Comments (0)

On Monday I ran across a website called Hit Tail while reading BusinessWeek’s Best of 2006 article. BusinessWeek gave Hit Tail a brief mention that said:

There is even a Web analytics site called HitTail.com that analyzes blog traffic and search patterns to spit out future post suggestions for bloggers eager to stay ahead of emerging trends and spike their rankings.

Intrigued, I went to Hit Tail and watched their demo video to better understand what they were all about. Hit Tail works by collecting information on the keywords that drive traffic to your blog or website. Hit Tail then aggregates those keywords, and uses their proprietary algorithm to look for patterns in your “long tail” keywords. Then, Hit Tail uses it’s algorithm to suggest potential keyword titles for future blog posts or articles for your site. The idea is that using the suggested keywords will help you focus your writing on long tail terms that should get you some traffic.

Getting Hit Tail set up is pretty simple (at least for people using blog software)…all you need to do is add a short piece of script on all of the pages of your website.

We have been testing Hit Tail on our Affiliate Blog and the results have been alright so far. To Hit Tail’s credit, it only has about 43 search phrases to work with, so I’m sure we’ll get more suggestions as the number of captured keywords increases. The four suggested keywords we have are:

• being an aflac agent (a pretty darn good blog post suggestion in my book)


• homeowners insurance florida cancelled (another good post suggestion)


• captive agent message board (this could work out as well)


• crop insurance rate discussion (this one is a little far off the mark for our company, but that’s not to say it isn’t a good suggestion)

As our account collects more data I have a feeling we will get some good keyword related blog post topics from Hit Tail. I haven’t decided if we should try Hit Tail on InsureMe.com – but I think there is some potential there. If you are running a site that gets a decent amount of natural search traffic, you might want to try out Hit Tail for your site. It could point you to some great topics for keyword focused articles.

[Get Health Insurance Quotes from InsureMe]

Posted by James Omdahl at 04:18 PM | Permalink | Comments (3)

One of our top SEO Ninja Affiliates called me today to see if I had noticed that the natural rankings in both Yahoo! and Google were looking a little nutty. I admitted that I hadn’t (refreshing search results to see if they have changed reminds me of watching my stocks after the internet bubble burst…not something I like to relive).

For the next 30 minutes or so the Ninja Affiliate took me to different insurance related keywords and pointed out some of the things he was noticing. Some of the more interesting anomalies/changes were:

A website that had a domain that was only a couple months old and barely any links ranking on the first page of Google for a competitive insurance keyword

• A site that was ranking well in Google but only had backlinks generated from blog spamming (so uncool).
• PageRank numbers for sites being back to the old PR numbers from before the most recent update (I did noticed this last week…hard to miss it when your website goes from a PR 8 to a PR 6).
• Sites shifting around from results page to results page on a daily basis on Yahoo and Google.
• Our top level domain disappearing from the Google search results for one particular keyword, and a random internal page showing up instead.
• You could only get to the 250th result on Google…after that you couldn’t browse any further.
• Natural search traffic to our internal content pages dropped yesterday fairly dramatically– the Ninja Affiliate saw a similar occurrence for his site, even though we are still ranking well for our big keywords

I’m not totally sure what this all means, except that it seems like Google and Yahoo are in the process of making some tweaks or changes. It could also mean that some of Google’s filters are on the fritz (age of domain and link quality come to mind), but the issues aren’t effecting everything. Or it could just mean that the Ninja and I have been staring at our screens for way to long.

What do you think? Are Ninja Affiliate and I the only ones noticing strange happenings in the search results? Have you heard anything about a Google and/or Yahoo update this week? If so, let us know what’s up.

Thanks!

[Note: I know I promised some info on Hit Tail today, but I want to give it a day or two more before I give an opinion on the service.]

Posted by James Omdahl at 02:58 PM | Permalink | Comments (7)

I know that a few of our affiliates are actively running blogs to try to generate leads from natural search traffic, and from what I hear it has been a little tough going. Let me assure you that you are not alone. InsureMe was the first lead generation company to start up an insurance focused consumer blog (www.insuremeblog.com/insurance), and at the end of this week, we will be shutting the insurance blog down.

There are a few reasons why we made this decision. We found that, even with very skilled copywriters, it is difficult to create a blog that is both interesting and able to draw in traffic that will convert to leads (you can count the number of leads our insurance blog generated on one hand…actually, on a woodshop teacher’s hand). Also, it turns out that no matter how hard we tried, it was very difficult to keep an audience…mainly because people don’t care to read about insurance on a regular basis (gasp!), unless they are insurance agents (and we already have a blog for insurance agents).

With all of that said, I still think that affiliates can use blogs as a tool to generate leads, but chances are you will be doing so by using your blog more as a content management system for publishing content rather than for “blogging” per say. I see blogging software as a great tool for creating websites without having to know a whole lot about HTML (although there are free CMS systems that work well too). With that said, if you do use a blogging platform as a CMS you will have to modify your blog templates a bit, but most people can pick that up after a bit of tinkering.

As far as designing your blog to work for lead generation, I would suggest a few things. First off, I would try to put a good amount of static text on your homepage (250 – 300 words). Make sure that text is focused on converting people into leads (the static text should also help with natural rankings for the homepage). Actually, I would try to minimize the amount of new content that is on the page…maybe set up your template to only show the title and an excerpt from your three most recent pieces of content. This should help minimize the number of people who get “lost” digging through the content on your site while keeping some text that continuously updates for SEO purposes (meaning your page will get spidered more often by search engines).

As always, if you are an InsureMe affiliate, make sure you use our quote box on every page of your site. By doing so, your visitors won’t have to make any additional clicks to start an insurance quote.

I guess the point of this message is this - even thought we are throwing in the towel on our consumer focused blog, it doesn’t mean you should. I believe there is a place for the use of blogs in insurance lead generation, but I think the blog should be used more as a platform than a medium.

Tomorrow I will tell you a bit about Hit Tail, a service I ran across in BusinessWeek, that will help you create content that will get you the most traffic to your blog…or at least that what Hit Tail says they do.

[By the way - if any of you have been enjoying our video blog posts, we will continue doing them, but we will do them over on the agent blog.]

Posted by James Omdahl at 03:25 PM | Permalink | Comments (2)

If you'd like to try your hand at affiliate marketing but you don't have your own Web site—and you don't know how to create one—never fear; Google is now offering a way to advertise without one.

Using Hosted Business Pages, a new feature with AdWords Starter Edition, you can now create an informational Web page that tells people more about your business when they click on your ads.

Consisting of a single landing page that pops up and tells consumers more about your company and what you have to offer, these pages make having a site of your own an unnecesary prequisite for affiliatedom (I always wanted to say that!).

Hosted Business Pages can contain any information you'd like displayed on the page: your company name, a service description, your contact information, or anything else you think might help convert visitors to customers.

And here's the best part: Google offers this service for free, with no knowledge of HTML required. They'll do all the work needed behind the scenes. Talk about making things easy!

While they're only offering this feature to new advertisers as of now, Google says it plans to eventually expand it to everyone.

Affiliate marketing without a Web site is easy now—so no more excuses! Read up on Hosted Business Pages here and give it a try. With Google's help, you can do it!

Posted by Penny Hagerman at 09:45 AM | Permalink | Comments (0)

I think it does ... so does HP and the state of California.

Read about it here.

Keep on ...

Posted by James Harvey at 01:49 PM | Permalink | Comments (0)

I'll refrain from commentary and allow you to digest yourself.

Read there response here.

Keep on ...

Posted by James Harvey at 01:45 PM | Permalink | Comments (0)

Jim Hedger from Webmaster Radio says yes…and it seems he has some proof.

I’m gonna stay far away from making any commentary on this one…but the story is picking up steam, so I thought you would want to find out more.

Posted by James Omdahl at 12:33 PM | Permalink | Comments (0)

Yesterday we had the chance to preview what our Yahoo! Search Marketing account looks like on the new “Panama” ad platform…and it was bad. In truth, the switch from the old Direct Traffic Center (DTC – the old Yahoo! ad platform) to the new Panama platform will basically render our account unusable.

Why? It all comes down to AdGroups.

But first a little background. The Yahoo! DTC had two levels of organization for their accounts – the campaign level and the keyword level. This was imperfect at best, since most advertisers ended up with a few thousand keywords in a single campaign. Yahoo! recognized that this was a problem and designed the new Panama interface with three levels of organization – campaign, keyword and AdGroup. If this sounds like Google AdWords, it should, since Yahoo! basically copied AdWords when designing much of Panama.

I think most advertisers would tell you that having another layer of organization in their Yahoo! account is a good thing…but going from the old DTC setup to the new Panama setup brought up a huge issue – who do you assign advertiser’s keywords into AdGroups when they move over to the Panama platform?

I don’t think there could have been a simple answer to this…but the solution that Yahoo! devised was, well, imperfect at best. In the end, Yahoo! decided that any keywords in your campaigns with similar advertisements would be grouped together into an AdGroup. Not a bad solution, except for the fact that many Yahoo! PPC advertisers have been writing custom ads for many of their keywords (a best practice for Yahoo!) – which means that every keyword might very well end up in an AdGroup of its own. And that, my friends, would pretty much stink.

And stink it does. Upon hitting the preview button to see what our Yahoo account would look like, we realized that our campaigns had hundreds of AdGroups under them. For example, we had a health insurance related campaign with 1,050 AdGroups in it…and those AdGroups were packed full of unrelated keywords. So basically, our Yahoo! account has become a giant, fat and ugly mess.

After a lot of nervous laughter from our Paid Search team, we started to strategize to see how we could fix the account. After much discussion we realized that taking our account as it was and getting it back into shape would likely take weeks of tedious work. This is not acceptable in my book.

In effect, Yahoo!’s Panama switchover has turned our Yahoo! PPC account into an unusable pile of AdGroup junk. Way to go Yahoo!

The good news is Yahoo! was smart enough to develop an import feature in Panama that allows advertisers to import their Google AdWords account into their Yahoo! account. At first I though this would be a great way to get AdWords advertisers who had yet to try out Yahoo! Search Marketing to try it out. Now I am realizing that many current Yahoo! advertisers will be forced to utilize this AdWords import function to completely rebuild their Yahoo! account…which means throwing out all of the work they have done on their Yahoo account. Ouch.

While this is an easy fix, it pains us to throw away the many of hours of work we spent building our Yahoo! account…and it hurts even more that we have to do it just because Yahoo! couldn’t find a better way to make the transition work.

So, are we the only people who have had their Yahoo! account blown up by Panama? Let us know by leaving a comment!

Posted by James Omdahl at 09:49 AM | Permalink | Comments (4)

It happens to the best of us ... those of us with high paying, high profile, CEO type jobs. For the record, I am CEO and management extraordinare' of my bathroom breaks.

When something doesn't go right, namely money, somebody gets fired. It appears it may be happening at Yahoo.

Read about it here.

Keep on ...

Posted by James Harvey at 03:15 PM | Permalink | Comments (0)

Yes, I am still alive ... much to the chagrin of certain unnamed individuals. For my dedicated fan club members, I offer my sincerest apologies for the absence. Please send your letters of protest to Omdahl.

So, do you think Google is any different from other huge, mammoth conglomerates? Yes? No? I think no.

Read why here.

Keep on ...

Posted by James Harvey at 03:04 PM | Permalink | Comments (0)

(Please excuse the obnoxious title – gotta have the right keywords, etc.)

For the last couple of months, I have spent a lot of time looking for a few good people to fill open positions here at InsureMe. While we have had a lot of interest in the positions, we have not yet found the right person for three of them. The thing is, we are a bit picky, but it’s like we are picking family members, so you gotta do what you gotta do.

The three positions we currently have open are:

Paid Search Manager – lead out amazing PPC team, strategize, analyze and kick some PPC tail

Paid Search Copywriter – create compelling ads and web copy that will entertain, educate and convert

Affiliate Coordinator – the backbone of our Affiliate Department. Help our affiliates by providing them the support they need to succeed

Why am I telling you all of this? Well, I am hoping you know someone who would totally rock at one of these positions. Or maybe you would rock? Eh?

If you do know someone who might fit well into one of these positions, let me know at jomdahl (at) insureme.com. Like I said, we are pretty picky when it comes to hiring people…but for the right person it could be a fantastic opportunity.

Did I mention that we were voted one of the best places to work in America? Did I also mention that our CEO drives a Mercedes covered in diamonds?

Ok, so I made up the Mercedes thing (thank you Photoshop!). But the best places to work thing it totally true!!!

Posted by James Omdahl at 04:47 PM | Permalink | Comments (0)

Are you tired of low-performing keywords that pull down your click-through rates (CTRs) in entire ad groups? Well, you're not alone. Anyone who's tried PPC knows how frustrating it can be trying to get keywords to perform like they should.

But hold on—before you go deleting mass quantities of terms that just aren't working, I'd like to share with you a strategy that might help you deal with those offenders and force them to perform as they should.

When particular terms don't seem to be working—or their cost per acquisition is too high—it sometimes helps to do what's called a "Peel and Stick." This means "peeling" them from their present ad group, "sticking" them in an ad group all their own, and writing ads designed just for those terms (rather than performing mass deletions).

Hopefully, this achieves two desired results:

1. Gives non-performing terms a chance to improve elsewhere
2. Keeps non-performers from dragging down the overall CTRs in their previous ad groups

Once you move non-performers into their own ad groups, watch them closely to see if their CTRs improve. If not, you can then delete them altogether, knowing you've done everything possible to help them perform.

If you haven't tried retaining keywords using the old peel and stick method, I'd highly recommend it. It's a great alternative to simply deleting keywords up front; and their performance on their own might just surprise you! :)

Posted by Penny Hagerman at 03:14 PM | Permalink | Comments (1)

Happy Monday!

I was digging through the messenger bag I use for work this weekend and found a blog post I printed out back in October but forgot to read. The post, vaguely titled Ross Dunn Answers SEO Question #4, got me thinking - are inbound links as important as I make them out to be?

The thing is, I have been doing SEO for about three years now and I InsureMe’s site has seen some decent results. One thing that I really started to notice about a year ago, at least in the insurance vertical, was that your inbound links seem to matter a heck of a lot more than your content. This was perplexing, since at every SEO conference someone is always preaching about how “content is king” – but to me it seems like content is, at best, the court jester.

In answering Question #4, Ross Dunn really helped me understand why perceive links to be the real King in SEO, and others still feel content and on-page optimization are King. I highly recommend reading the entire blog post, but to give you a taste, here are some of Ross’ main points:

• Links are extremely important, but your content and on-page optimizations have to be good to harness the full power of your inbound links
• Some sites might rank very well with little or no content and a ton of good links, on the other had, some sites will rank well with great content and only a few good links.
• Every site ranks based on links and on-page factors…the importance of those two factors can and will vary from site to site.

Interesting stuff, huh?

Many thank yous to Ross for writing such a clear and informative post. It really helped me get some more perspective on link building versus on-page optimization. :)

Posted by James Omdahl at 10:08 AM | Permalink | Comments (0)

It’s my last post for tracking week (whew), I want to talk about what can be one of the trickier things to track, your SEO results. While I think there are a number of tracking software programs out there, there are ways of tracking SEO without using any expensive software.

The first thing you need to track your SEO results is some SEO traffic. Since I am limited on space and time here, I’ll assume you have that part down already. :)

Next, I would look at how you have set up the tracking on your site. If at all possible, you are going to want to split out your PPC traffic from your SEO traffic. One way to do this would be to set up different webpages for your SEO and PPC efforts. If you want to use the same content for your SEO and PPC pages, I would suggest leaving the original page up as an SEO page and then make a clone of that page under a different URL for your PPC traffic. (To avoid any duplicate content issues, make sure you use the “noindex,nofollow” meta tag on your PPC pages.)

Now that you have two pages, make sure you use different links on both of the pages so you can see which traffic came from which link.

Once you have done that, you can see which conversions are coming in through your SEO efforts. But knowing what pages are converting is only half the battle. Now you should figure out what keywords you are ranking for so you can track search engine rankings.

Now, once again, I know there are programs out there that go out and check your rankings…and I am sure there are some that work. I used to use WebPostion Gold, but got guilty/paranoid about hitting Google and Yahoo with automated programs…which is a no-no in the Webmaster guidelines. So by swearing off automated programs I have started to use some manual processes and analytics programs to track SEO performance.

If you are not already using Google Analytics, I would suggest you open an account. Google Analytics provides you a report called your “Overall Keyword Conversion” that shows you the different keywords that are driving traffic to your site. By sifting through this report, you will be able to identify what keywords are sending natural traffic to your site. It is also helpful to find new keywords that you might have started ranking well for recently.

After scanning Google Analytics, I like to pick my top 20 or 30 most important keywords and build a list of keywords to watch. You can use Excel, or make a list in a notebook, or whatever you want to do, so long as you are tracking regularly. I check my rankings for the various terms by simply conducting searches on the search engines I follow (Google and Yahoo – MSN is too spastic for me to really follow). I like to track my rankings about once a week, and I do it on a Monday (I always seem to notice ranking changes happen on the weekend – so Monday seems to be a good day for looking). By jotting down your rankings on a weekly basis you should be able to get a decent feel for how things are going in your SEO efforts.

Once note of caution though – if you are ranked on the third page or higher, don’t be too alarmed if your pages fluctuate three of four positions every time you check. The further you get from the first page, the higher your chances of seeing the subtle (and not so subtle) difference between the data centers.

Well, I hope that helped at least some of you. If you are anything like me you are probably a little trackinged out – so next week I promise not to talk about tracking at all! Hooray!

But before we bury the tracking topic altogether, help me out by sharing how you track your SEO performance. Also, if you have a rank tracking software program you want to recommend, please leave a comment with the program’s name.

Welp, happy weekend!

[Note: One last thing on tracking…I’m not sure if this happened to any of our affiliates, but today we got an email from Yahoo saying that they had shut off our Yahoo Conversion Counter. After a frantic call to Yahoo, it turns out the email was sent on accident and everyone’s Conversion Counters are working just fine. I wonder if anyone is getting unemployed for that mistake?]

Posted by James Omdahl at 04:11 PM | Permalink | Comments (2)